lest we lose the thread of our prayer, or forget that so fit and so fine expression.  The longer we are the better in secret prayer.  Much speaking is really a virtue in secret prayer; much speaking and many repetitions.  Also, we can put things into our secret prayers that we dare not come within a thousand miles of in the pulpit, or the prayer-meeting, or the family.  We can enter into the most plain-spoken particulars about ourselves in secret.  We can put our proper name upon ourselves, and upon our actions, and especially upon our thoughts when our door is shut.  Then, again, we can pray for other people by name in secret; we can enter, so far as we know them, into all their circumstances in a way it is impossible to do anywhere but in the utmost secrecy.  We can, in short, be ourselves in secret; and, unless it is to please or to impress men, we had better not pray at all unless we are ourselves when we are engaged in it.  You can be yourself, your very worst self; nay, you must be, else you will not long pray in secret, and even if you did you would not be heard.  I do not remember that very much is said in so many words in her after-history about Christiana’s habits of closet-prayer.  But that Secret taught her the way, and waited till she had tasted the sweetness and the strength of being a good while on her knees alone, I am safe to say; indeed, I read it between the lines in all her after-life.  She was rewarded openly in a way that testifies to much secret prayer; that is to say, in the early conversion of her children, in the way they settled in life, and such like things.  Pray much for those things in secret that you wish to possess openly.

5.  But perhaps the best and most infallible evidence we can have of the truth of our religion in this life is in the steady increase of our secret sinfulness.  Christiana had no trouble with her own wicked heart so long as she was a woman of a wicked life.  But directly she became a new creature, her heart began to swarm, such is her own expression, with sinful memories, sinful thoughts, and sinful feelings; till she had need of some one ever near her, like Greatheart, constantly to assure her that those cruel and deadly swarms, instead of being a bad sign of her salvation, were the very best signs possible of her good estate.  Humility is the foundation of all our graces, and there is no humility so deep and so ever-deepening as that evangelical humility which in its turn rises out of and rests upon secret sinfulness.  Not upon acts of secret sin.  Do not mistake me.  Acts of secret sin harden the heart and debauch the conscience.  But I speak of that secret, original, unexplored, and inexpugnable sinfulness out of which all a sinner’s actual sins, both open sins and secret, spring; and out of which a like life of open and actual sins would spring in God’s very best saints, if only both He and they did not watch night and day against them.  Sensibility to sin, or rather to sinfulness, is far